"death! death! death!"

When I first moved to New York, I would chant these words as I bargained my life against the streets and the crosswalk that never seemed to stop the flow of movement. Some of my friends found it a bit morbid, but I just found it appropriate seeing as I was cheating it every time.

Today I was cruising down the highway in a borrowed mini-cooper. I was behind the dreaded ‘self-movers,’ equipped with every piece of house ware furniture imaginable. A yellow fabric cloth flew off the back and nearly obstructed my view. I instinctively swerved to the left and sped around the caboodle. About thirty feet in front of the vagabonds, I looked in my rear-view mirror– just in time to see a dresser, a six-foot kitchen table and chair set, and various pieces of furniture fly and break into the hard highway. Cars slammed on their brakes & (I assume) into one another just in time for the five o’clock news. It’s things like this that remind me how temporary our lives can be–that you could be nothing against the forces of, say, a dresser?

I’ve always had this theory about dying. “If it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go,” is the most relative and somewhat comforting of the understandings of what will inevitably be your own ending. I, however, think the way you exit should hopefully reflect the way you lived (or wanted to live) your life. Take me, for example. I want to make the news…like the national news. I want to be the ‘girl flung 1/4 mile from a roller coaster,’ or something equally as perilous and awesome.

One of my favorite headlines by far came during the forest fires that littered California a few years back. Search teams found scuba gear in the middle of the forest long after the fires had gone. As it turns out, firefighting teams used helicopters to secure giant vats of water from the ocean and dumped them from thousands of feet above the fires. The best day to go for a scuba dive? Most likely not. But, no pun intended, one ‘hell’ of a way to go.

If you’re certain of where you’re going afterwards, why not make your ‘last hoorah’ newsworthy?